Don't follow the leader: Independent thinkers create scientific innovation

Abstract

Academic success is distributed unequally; a few top scientists receive the bulk of attention, citations, and resources. However, do these "superstars" foster leadership in scientific innovation? We introduce three information-theoretic measures that quantify novelty, innovation, and impact from scholarly citation networks, and compare the scholarly output of scientists who are either not connected or strongly connected to superstar scientists. We find that while connected scientists do indeed publish more, garner more citations, and produce more diverse content, this comes at a cost of lower innovation and higher redundancy of ideas. Further, once one removes papers co-authored with superstars, the academic output of these connected scientists diminishes. In contrast, authors that produce innovative content without the benefit of collaborations with scientific superstars produce papers that connect a greater diversity of concepts, publish more, and have comparable citation rates, once one controls for transferred prestige of superstars. On balance, our results indicate that academia pays a price by focusing attention and resources on superstars.

Ranking mobility and impact inequality in early academic careers

“…Although academic impact is certainly a multifaceted concept, it is in fact undeniable that citations and citationbased indicators have become the currency of academic progression in a number of countries and academic systems [29], sometimes leading to unintended consequences on citation behaviours and patterns [18,30]. To push this analogy even further, a number of studies have shown that academic impact, as measured via citations, is partially inherited from mentors and/or senior collaborators [16,15,31,32], quite similarly to family wealth which is passed on through generations. We wish to stress that here we are not endorsing an uncritical use of citations and citation-based indicators as a measure of academic impact.…”